HE ART RENEWAL CENTER takes great pride in presenting the Award Winners and Top 100 Finalists from our 2nd International ARC Salon(tm) Competition. With nearly 1500 entries received from 30 countries around the world, this year's competition has proved to be a true International event and we rightly believe that this may be the finest competition since the Paris Salons before World War I.

ARC is truly elated with the quality of work submitted in this year's competition. The unprecedented success of the First International ARC Salon(tm) brought tremendous response to this year's competition. Young gifted artists who are just now beginning their careers to some of the most legendary and well-respected artists alive today were brought together in a single competition where the prestige of even making it to the Finals now carries significant weight with galleries, collectors and peers.

This year's Best in Show with an honorarium of $10,000 has been awarded to Paul G. Oxborough of the USA for his painting First One Up, which depicts 3 girls exquisitely composed on a sea of white sheets. With $3,000 and Awarded for the very first time by ARC, "The William Bouguereau Award - Emotion Theme and the Figure" goes to Iman Maleki of Iran for his delicately rendered portrayal of 2 young women seated upon a rooftop, titled Omens of Hafez. Together with 3 Awards in each of the 5 Categories, 3 Purchase Awards, plus the addition of 6 Chairman's Choice Awards and 3 ARC Staff Awards, the allotted prize amount in this year's ARC Salon(tm) has been well exceeded with more than $222,000 in total.

ARC is honored to have two new judges in the rotation with Peter Trippi, the director of the Dahesh Museum of Art in New York City and Internationally renowned artist and instructor Jacob Collins who is also the director of the Water Street Atelier in NYC. Completing this year's panel is ARC's own Chairman and Founder, Fred Ross. Our esteemed judges have all expressed the extreme difficulty in making their final decisions due to the very diverse styles of masterful execution and the vast array of subject matter found within all of the finalist's works of art.

From all across the world the very best of the best artists are now here for your viewing pleasure. We invite you to celebrate with us in honoring all of our Finalists and Award Winners for the incredible high quality and timeless beauty found within this exhibit. On behalf of our Chairman, Fred Ross and everyone here at the Art Renewal Center a well-deserved congratulations is extended to all of our Award winners and participants. We thank them for their dedication to the upholding of artistic traditions and values sought by ARC and wish them continued success in all their artistic endeavors.

Message from the ARC Chairman

HE NIGHTMARE is really starting to end!
Beyond question, the current 2005 ARC Salon(tm) puts to rest one of the most offensive claims made about realism.

We have all heard modernists say that,

“It has all been done.”

“There is nothing realism can say any more that has not already been said by those who were far better.”

That is just as absurd as saying the same thing about literature or poetry.

“It has all been done!”

Or theatre, dance, or music.

Not only has it not all been done, but quite the opposite is the case.

The last 500 years is but the beginning of what the human mind is capable when it comes to the potential compositions, themes, and techniques available to Traditional Realism.

The breadth and the expanse of human expression is filled with endless possibilities, as are the heavens and nature itself. We are only just beginning to explore all of the new, poetic, and magnificent ways of expressing the full range of human emotions with beauty, poetry, and grace.

With 1496 entries in this year’s ARC Salon(tm), the first challenge, to narrow it down to just 100 finalists, was a task of formidable dimensions. There were at least 500 or 600 other works that were but a hair’s breadth away from also being worthy of finalist status.

Then to choose the winners, honorable mentions, and all the other awards and prizes was very difficult, and you should all know that there were in fact considerable differences in the choices and preferences of the judges.

But we ultimately did choose, and I know most of you will be as ecstatic as we are with the results. In all, the combination of prizes, awards, and purchase awards to date has totaled more than $215,000 and climbing.

More importantly, nothing in the art world has produced a body of work of this quality since the Paris Salons and Royal Academy exhibitions from before 1910.

I ask every one of our 5,600,000 visitors to offer their congratulations to all of the winners.

We are all really winners now with the growth, expansion, and success of the Art Renewal Center and the ARC Approved list of Schools, the ARC Living Masters, and now the ARC Salon. And we are once again heading down the road paved by the thousands of great and old master artists of the past 25 centuries.

We are pleased to announce that the winner of the 2005 ARC Salon(tm) People's Choice Award is ... Phillipa Stephenson with her sculpture The Runner. Our warmest congratulations go to Phillipa, and to all the winners, finalists and honorable mentions in this year's competition. Our thanks also go to everyone in the public who chose to participate in our first People's Choice Award.

"This painting is one of the very best in our collection by any living artist; it is clearly on a par with some of the finest work of the past. I felt a need to express why this work is such a major achievement…. so I wrote the following ..."

"There is a hushed dignity to her on the one hand, set off by an enormous emotional power, pent up yet under rigid control due to the societal setting that we can only imagine must be occurring from her proper seated position while wearing what appears to be a graduation, debutante or wedding dress. Her bemused sideward glance at the viewer while forever trapped in that setting creates one of the strongest focal points I’ve ever seen in most any other painting.

Her eye’s path successfully takes all of the inner strength of personality, and discharges it directly into that part of one’s soul where resides one’s aesthetic and poetic sensibilities, capturing at once her dignity, beauty and energetic spirit. Intelligent, knowing, and perhaps more than a bit mischievous, you sense here is someone who is just loaded with fun, and an intense playful love of life. She is in complete control of herself, but yet so clearly impatient to be set free from her bondage to whichever societal or cultural tradition in which she has been forced temporarily to play a part. She is in fact playing with her hands, reflecting a playful spirit, and perhaps her way of holding at bay all that pent up energy."